


in the dream i don't tell anyone

by escherzo



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Columbus Blue Jackets, First Time, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 09:21:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10533525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escherzo/pseuds/escherzo
Summary: “So,” Marcus says, five minutes into the drive, with the silence in the car so icy and thick it’s almost suffocating. It’s not the start of a statement. It’s all he needs to say.So.So you lost. So I got lucky, and if I hadn’t, I might have accidentally cut your teammate’s throat instead of his shoulder. So you and I came a hair’s breadth from dropping the gloves with each other.Nick doesn’t respond.





	

**Author's Note:**

> set immediately after the 3/11 game in Buffalo where Marcus stepped on Cam and then everyone on the Jackets tried to murder him for it

“So,” Marcus says, five minutes into the drive, with the silence in the car so icy and thick it’s almost suffocating. It’s not the start of a statement. It’s all he needs to say. _So._

So you lost. So I got lucky, and if I hadn’t, I might have accidentally cut your teammate’s throat instead of his shoulder. So you and I came a hair’s breadth from dropping the gloves with each other. 

Nick doesn’t respond. He doesn’t really need to do it; all of that is hanging unspoken between them. Maybe it was a bad idea, in retrospect, to have agreed ahead of time to stay at Marcus’s after the game instead of in the hotel with the guys, not knowing how the game would go, but he could have hardly predicted _this_. 

He’s still pissed. Marcus might be, too, but it’s always easier to let bygones be bygones when you’re the one who won. 

“Dad’s coming over for breakfast tomorrow,” Marcus says, later, just to fill the silence. “He said a hotel bed’s easier on his back than my guest room is.” 

“You still haven’t gotten rid of that old mattress?”

“Meant to. Been too busy.”

“Figures.”

The light they’re stopped at turns green, and Marcus presses down a little too hard on the accelerator, lurching them forward, and Nick grips the side of his seat with both hands. It’s all too easy to remember back to the days when Marcus was still learning how to drive and perpetually had a lead foot. Not that Nick got to be around much, in those days. 

Don’t fucking start, Marcus doesn’t say, and doesn’t need to.

*

The tension is still simmering between them by the time they get in the door. Nick huffs out a breath and steps past Marcus to storm down the hall and throw his gear against the guest bed, relishing in the way it groans in protest, fists still itching to hit _something_. He shouldn’t be around Marcus right now. Or anyone, really. Sometimes he gets like this, so unable to let go of the loss all he can do is wallow in rage. At home, this is when he goes for a midnight run. It’s too cold to do that in fucking Buffalo tonight, and on the second half of a back-to-back, he’s got no energy to do it either.

“Don’t break my fucking bed,” Marcus says, from behind him, and Nick whirls around.

“Don’t fucking swear at me.” 

“Man, you’re a piece of work tonight.” 

Nick glares at him, tries to draw himself up taller and square his shoulders to get Marcus to back off, like he did when they were kids and they’d get into arguments. They never fought outright, then, but then, Marcus was smaller than him until after he’d already left for juniors. 

It doesn’t work so well, now. Marcus has fifteen pounds and a full five inches on him—three, if you believe their official heights, which are very kind to Nick. 

They never _fought_ back then.

This is an important distinction to make, some distant part of Nick notes, as he and Marcus both lunge at each other at once and end up crashing to the ground. Wrestling isn’t the same thing as fighting. And that, they certainly did—and Nick no longer has the upper hand like he used to, no weight advantage as he tries to pin Marcus down and Marcus latches onto his legs and flips him like it’s nothing, hands like iron around his wrists. He bares his teeth and Marcus bares his right back, primal, and Nick isn’t proud of himself for kicking Marcus in the back of the leg and then pulling his hair, but he’ll take the advantages he can get. 

“Fuck, _ow!_ ” Marcus yelps, so distracted by it that he lets his grip on Nick slip, and then Nick’s the one pinning him. “Pulling my _hair?_ Jesus.” 

“Hey, you earned it,” Nick says, adrenaline starting to override the anger. His grin is almost involuntary. “I wasn’t the one who started the dumb shit off tonight.”

“I didn’t pull anyone’s hair,” Marcus says, and he grabs Nick’s arms and rolls them both onto their sides, one leg thrown over his hip, trying to muscle him into place. “Hockey play.” 

“Dumb shit hockey play.”

“I never said I was the smart one.”

“You don’t have to be that smart to not fucking step on people.”

“ _Accident,_ ” Marcus stresses, pulling Nick into him harder to try and roll them, but Nick’s not going, and—fuck. 

Oh, fuck.

Neither of them have to say anything, but they’re both frozen, because maybe it’s the adrenaline or the body heat or—who knows, but. They’re both hard, and Nick has to squeeze his eyes shut against the sensation spiking through him all of a sudden, and this is not something he is equipped to know what to do with. 

When he opens his eyes again, Marcus is staring at him, eyes wide, lip caught in his teeth. 

Well.

The thing to do, right now, would be to call the fight off and pretend this never happened. It’d be embarrassing, maybe something they’d laugh about or make awkward mention of when really drunk, if that, and that would be that. Gone. Forgotten.

Nick’s stomach lurches, and he can’t tell if it’s arousal or fear, because—his first instinct is not that. His first thought, spiking through him like a shock as he’s here on the floor, staring at Marcus staring at him, is to grind back against Marcus and see how he reacts. See if he’ll keep going. 

_What the fuck_ , he thinks, trying to shake the thought from his own brain.

“I—“ Marcus starts, and then stops, and there’s something in his eyes that Nick sees and recognizes. That bit of fear, of curiosity, that moment before the adrenaline rush of leaping off a cliff into the water. 

He’s thinking about it too.

It wouldn’t be the first time Nick’s thought it, exactly, but it’s always been the kind of fantasy that snuck in as an invasive thought and he’d have to shake his head to get rid of, when he was younger. The kind that, if he’s honest with himself, got him a little closer to the edge. Forbidden fruit, or something. Some fucked-up permutation of Catholic guilt that resulted in the most guilt-inducing fantasies possible. 

He doesn’t say ‘oh, fuck it,’ out loud, but when he meets Marcus’s eyes and presses their hips together, he thinks it’s kind of implied.

Marcus’s eyes darken, and when he pushes Nick onto his back, looming over him, Nick lets himself be moved. When Marcus pins his wrists to the carpet and grinds down against him, friction sweet and painful, he gives himself over to it, head thrown back, teeth gritted against the noise he wants to let out.

“You know,” Marcus says, breathless, “we could… not be on the floor. You’re going to get carpet burn.”

“Trying to mess up my hands so you can score more than me,” Nick accuses, grinning at him. “I’m onto you.”

“Oh shut up and come on.”

Marcus gets up and reaches a hand out to him, and the two of them make their way down the hall to Marcus’s bedroom.

The guest bed really does suck.

*

Marcus doesn’t leave the lights on. 

Nick’s grateful. It’s… already a lot, and he’s caught in the valley between arousal and fear or arousal because of fear, or some other confused mess of the two, as he strips out of his gameday suit. He folds it, just to regain a little composure. To feel like he’s still got some control over the situation. It helps, a little.

“Always the neat freak,” Marcus scoffs, and his own suit ends up in a puddle on the floor. 

“Shut up,” Nick says, and kneels up onto the bed before grabbing Marcus around the waist from behind and pulling him down onto the bed with him. He goes for the ticklish spots first, just out of habit, and Marcus laughs and squirms and kicks at him and then shuts them both up entirely by running both hands down Nick’s back, slow and smooth. He stops just at the base of Nick’s spine, not quite brave enough to go further.

“You can,” Nick says. It’s easier, here in the dark, to say it.

“Fuck.”

It’s like a dream Nick has had a hundred times and never admitted to having, as he and Marcus shift until they fit together, Marcus’s legs around his and his hands on Nick’s body, hips pressed together. Marcus is so warm against him, and his body is so familiar, but not—in this context. He knows Marcus so well, but not like this, not until now.

“You feel good,” he confesses, and Marcus groans and pulls Nick down against him, hands sliding down further until he’s gripping Nick’s ass. His hands are huge. There’s knowing it, and then there’s feeling it, and Marcus squeezes, directing them as they work up to a rhythm, cocks sliding against each other, Nick pressing his face into Marcus’s collarbone to keep in the plaintive noises he wants to make. 

He’s always been a talker in bed. He’s trying so hard not to let it out now.

He wants to tell Marcus, “I’d let you do anything.” Wants to say, “Your hands are so big, and I want to know what it’s like when your fingers are inside me.” Wants to beg.

Instead he lifts his head and says, “I love you,” the simplest, truest thing he can say to Marcus right now, and Marcus looks back, so painfully fond.

“Do you—“ Marcus cranes towards Nick only a little, but they’ve never needed too many words between them, and Nick gets the message just fine. Another shock of arousal-fear goes through him in the moment before he kisses his brother, but he does it, lips catching Marcus’s gently before he deepens the kiss, warmth and wetness and swallowing up Marcus’s noises before they come out. 

Marcus’s fingers dip into the cleft of his ass, the pad of one stroking over his hole, and Nick shakes and comes, just like that. Marcus’s eyes widen, feeling the warmth between them, and he follows him over the edge, holding Nick tight as they both shudder through the aftershocks. 

They don’t stop kissing for a long while, after. It’s part curiosity, part reassurance— _we’re okay, I still love you, it was okay that we both really liked this._

“Hey,” Marcus says into the silence, later, after he’s sacrificed his undershirt to cleanup and they’re both sprawled out on the sheets, still naked. “Can I tell you something?”

“Yeah, what?”

“I don’t know if you thought about this before but when you had that girlfriend you were always sneaking over when we were younger I thought about you two together a _lot_.” 

Nick laughs. He can’t help it.

“I thought we were being stealthy!”

“Uh, no.”

“Whoops.”

It’s the sort of whoops that implies not actually feeling bad about the situation at all, and Marcus knows it, so when Nick gets a pillow to the face, he’s sort of expecting it. 

He retaliates, of course.

*

In the morning, it’s almost not a shock to be met first thing with the sight of Marcus, naked in the same bed. Nick knows damn well he should feel guilty, or sick, or at least apologize for letting things escalate the way they did. There are a hundred things he’s supposed to be feeling, or—probably supposed to be feeling, they don’t really make a handbook for this scenario in Emotions 101. But.

The only thing he feels, in the moment, is fond.

“Hey,” he says, kissing Marcus’s shoulder. “I’ll make breakfast for all of us. You go get a shower.”

“Mrgh,” Marcus says. 

“Glad you agree,” Nick says, and slides out of bed.


End file.
